Russia Thinks The Cold War Is Back, But Americans Aren’t Paying Attention(Source thefederalist.com)

Russia is resurrecting Soviet-era tactics and moving, with allies like Iran, to change the international order, and we’re still acting like they’re our partners in places like Syria.

Imagine Russian school children practicing putting on gas masks and transporting dummies onto stretchers. TV stations show Russian emergency workers in hazmat suits working on bomb shelters. Huge numbers of the population rehearse what to do in case of a nuclear attack. It sounds like a scene from “The Americans” or a video from Soviet-era Russia. But it’s not. This is what’s been going on in Russia in the past few weeks. Russia is engaged in mass-scale nuclear attack preparations. Moscow is upgrading its civil defense plans, including making an inventory of all underground spaces to ensure it could shelter 100 percent of the population if a nuclear bomb hit. Current bomb shelters are being rehabbed and ventilation systems checked. Forty million Russians were involved in a drill simulating what to do in the event of a chemical or nuclear weapons strike.

This might seem surprising or unthinkable. But if you’ve been paying attention to the escalation of tensions between Russia and the United States, this fits perfectly into Russia’s intensifying belligerence and assertion of power. In the last few months, Russia’s relationship with America has begun to fray. But this mounting antagonism began much earlier, with Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and incursion in the Ukraine in 2014. Russia was testing how the West, including Europe and the United States, would react to it making land grabs in Eastern Europe. To its delight, the West did nothing. This set the stage for Russia to begin increasing its global show of force, and was a precursor to the inevitable invasion of one of the Baltic States.

Tensions further rose when Russia began fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al Assad in the ongoing brutal civil war. Under the auspices of attacking ISIS, Russia’s air force has helped Assad pummel Syrian rebels and civilians, creating a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. Despite numerous efforts at diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the diplomatic process has completely deteriorated. Adding to the chaos, after a mistaken American strike on Syrian troops, Russia threated to shoot down American planes if its troops felt threated. As a reaction to crumbling negotiations in Syria, Russia declared earlier this month that it was withdrawing from a 2000 nuclear security agreement with the United States that called for disposing plutonium. The now-defunct treaty also required Russia not to use any plutonium for nuclear activities.